So much for the first privately funded spacecraft... it crashed on launch
(
http://www.slate.com/id/2120935/)
The "solar sailboat"
(
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/19/AR2005061900653.html)
was a novel approach to space travel that had a theoretic possibility of working (though the physicists I mentioned it too seemed a little sceptical)...
I was hoping that something like the possibility of better space travel would be enough to take the populace's mind off of the utimately meaningless conflicts that dominate our lives at times... I mean, from my perspective, why fight over a couple of resources when we could be travelling the stars? How meaningless are ethnic tensions when we could discover parellel universes? Can science solve our woes?